DID THE FRENCH BEHAVE AS COWARDS IN THE WWII BATTLE OF FRANCE?

This is a criticism of the belief that the French behaved as cowards in the WWII Battle of France. It is a starting point that might be developed in either of two directions, either by expanding on it with a view to thoroughness or by condensing it with a view to submitting it as a letter to the editor. As a disclaimer, I volunteer that although I intend to be informed in my judgments, I am not an historian but a French major. These are my opinions and they are not authoritative. Most of the facts here have been gleaned from Wikipedia.

Demeaning the French in order to discredit their beliefs is a logical fallacy, and moreover it is dirty pool. Beliefs should be judged on the basis of facts and reason, not by whose beliefs they are; even a scoundrel can sometimes speak the truth. The term “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” was coined by a writer for a TV comedy show and I won’t dispute his right to say anything that gets a laugh from his targeted audience. What I am concerned with here is the use that is made of French-bashing for political purposes.

What does the political use of French-bashing tell us about the moral character of the French people and the truth or falsity of their statements? Nothing, but the name-calling and the lying of French-bashing talk show hosts, journalists and politicians reveals that they will resort to character assassination to sway public opinion in a political argument between France and the United States.

In my long lifetime, I have seen de Gaulle accuse the United States of excesses in its conduct of the Vietnam War, Chirac contradict us on Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, and Macron oppose Donald Trump over the reality of global warming. While only facts and reasoning are relevant to these disputes, French-bashers each time stir up popular prejudices to discredit French thinking by alleging numerous French vices, for example their cowardice in war.

It is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of France’s positions in these three conflicts whether the French gave up the Battle of France without a fight. Nevertheless, if only to defend France’s honor, I will refute this proposition and remind that France won WWII alongside its allies after losing that first battle. De Gaulle said at the time that France had lost a battle but France had not lost the war, and he proved to be right. As a victor in WWII, France was entrusted with a sector to govern in the occupation of Germany and also with a seat on the United Nations Security Council having the veto power, a distinction that is shared with only four other countries in the world.

As for giving up the Battle of France without a fight, I would ask the French-bashers by what standards they judge the French to be cowardly. Is it always wrong to retreat and always right to fight to the death? They seem to answer yes to both questions, but I say no. Remember, we Americans retreated in Korea and signed an armistice with North Korea and China. So let’s not be hypocritical. As a Vietnam-era veteran and as a Choctaw, I refuse to accuse of cowardice anyone who faithfully served his country in wartime or any nation that faced the hard choice between surrender and annihilation, as my peaceful American Indian tribe unjustly was forced to do.

Both the British and the French military were right to retreat from the Battle of France, but the British retreat across the English Channel was successful and the French retreat was not; the planned evacuation of the French government and its military forces to French Africa was thwarted when the faster moving Germans cut off the escape route; that does not make the French cowardly, instead it counts toward justifying their surrender. The democratically elected Third French Republic government of Paul Reynaud was trapped within the European borders of France, fell, and was replaced in a coup d’etat that abolished the Republic by creating the French State dictatorial regime of Philippe Petain, who capitulated to Hitler and fell into his political orbit.

Fortunately, Great Britain maintained in effect its alliance with France and transferred that commitment to the French government in exile of General Charles de Gaulle. Also, France continued an existence in its overseas departments and in its empire that became General de Gaulle’s power base in his struggle to retake France from Petain and the Nazis. From small beginnings in 1940, de Gaulle’s Free France government grew to include all of overseas France and its colonies, and his Free French military forces grew to 1,250,000 - not including those forces directly attached to Allied forces. Also, de Gaulle succeeded in organizing disparate French resistance movements into an effective clandestine force called “La Resistance.” In this way, de Gaulle succeeded where the French Third Republic’s retreat failed. He reconstituted French forces outside of the area controlled by the Germans, re-engaged battle with them under more favorable circumstances, and won.

Did the French fight hard enough and long enough in the Battle of France? The French-bashers seem to say no. I can think of at least three counter-instances to this judgment without doing any research:

1. In the Ardennes forest, a “maison forte” positioned at a bottleneck in the road and manned by four French soldiers held at bay a column of German tanks for four hours before running out of ammunition and being killed.

2. Colonel but soon to be General, Charles de Gaulle led a tank force in a counterattack against one of Germany’s best theoreticians and commanders, General Heinz Guderian, whose tanks he forced back to within 1 mile of Guderian’s headquarters before being ordered to retreat for lack of support.

3. French forces at Dunkirk fought and died, and were deliberately sacrificed to shield the retreating British army from German attack.

Considering that the French were not known for cowardice prior to the Battle of France and that after it they continued in their tradition of courage in battle - think of Bir Hakeim and later battles for example - I suspect that cowardice is not the explanation for their initial defeat. There are other possible causes and combinations of causes, such as General Huntziger’s discounting the possibility of a German surprise attack through the Ardennes Forest, as well as the French High Command’s paying less attention to de Gaulle’s thinking about mechanized warfare than the Germans did. A host of other causes make cowardice less likely as an explanation for their loss in this first battle.

True courage defends its values against both friends and enemies, and true friends tell their friends when they are wrong. De Gaulle defended French sovereignty against Roosevelt and Churchill as well as against Hitler and Petain, and France told us when we were wrong about Viet Nam, Iraq, and global warming. The French are not “surrender monkeys” but our oldest allies, just as the French are the Choctaw’s oldest non-Indian allies. Without our help in WWI and WWII, the French might be speaking German today, but without the predominant contributions of France both on land and at sea to our victory at the Revolutionary War’s decisive Battle of Yorktown we might be speaking the King’s English of the Fowler brothers instead H.L. Mencken’s American language.

P.S.: I am a citizen of the United States and France as well as of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and I love and respect all three nations. My object here is to undo harm done to France’s good reputation for political purposes. I am just as concerned to defend the American and Choctaw nations when they are subjected to unfair criticism.

Was working on this post when reddit crashed :(

Anyways, following up on last week's post. Today I will be contextualizing Lou Harrison's musical training in the Western world, and his exposure to music from non-Western cultures. If I have time I may introduce some of the specialist literature related to his reception at the end, to give context to some of the claims of appropriation, exploitation, orientalism, and musical-hybridity we see surrounding his career.

Harrison's early musical development in San Francisco involved interactions with old music (such as gregorian chant), Stravinsky, Henry Cowell, and Charles Ives. Much of Harrison's early music is in the tradition of European-American Modernism, and Cowell's Avant Garde. Harrison, especially early in his career, was artistically involved with fellow composer John Cage, who remained a lifelong friend. By looking at his scores, and his early music we can see Cowell's influence, the Europeans (Ravel, Stravinsky), and Ives.

Take for example his Reel (Homage to Henry Cowell): Present are Cowell's tone clusters (which iirc, he took from Charles Ives), a "B" section that is reminiscent of Ravel or Debussy, and non-functional harmony. Lou here certainly shows an affinity for the modernist tradition to which he was exposed to early. However, one must also note that Harrison was also being exposed to music outside of the West.

Harrison took a class with Henry Cowell titled "The Music of the World's Peoples", where he was exposed to a few non-western traditions. Not to mention, he was a regular at the Chinese Opera in the City. Chinese Opera, and Cowell's tutelage pre-disposed Harrison to writing for percussion... a lot. Harrison has some parts of his music that I believe to be callbacks to his early interest in chinese music. [1,2, and 3]In the percussion tradition Harrison is often times seen as one of the pioneers of percussion Chamber music. Additionally, due to Cowell's influence, Harrison's music was well into the dissonant atonal that was developing. This later left a good deal of beef with Aaron Copland, later on, considering he at one point called Harrison's music, offhandedly commenting that Harrison's Prelude for Grandpiano was just another of those "None too original pieces in that old radical tradition". [4] Biographers Alves and Campbell (who I will note are not trained music historians) suggest that "Copland's dismissive sentence reflect the current rivalry between the traditionalist and experimentalist camps of American composer." I'm not certain that there was much of a rivalry at this point. The American compositional tradition was rather young at this point. However, I will note that Copland studied with Boulanger (hardcore traditionalist teacher), and perhaps this is more of a jab at Cowell's auto-didactic education in music as something sort of illegitimate?

Whatever the case is, I have some reasons to not fully trust the image that Harrison biographers paint of the American musical landscape at the time. [5]

It was also about a year after this time that Harrison had a formative experience with Balinese Gamelan (Gamelan is a percussion orchestra), hearing it live for the first time. Harrison would later acquaint himself with the ethnomusicological works of Colin McPhee on Bali, doing exercises described by McPhee in his studies in order to get a better grasp of the music. Notably in Lou's 1949 piece Solstice we hear something that sounds a lot like Balinese gamelan. In the piece we have the presence of the Pelog scale, which Harrison approximates with the pitches C#, D, E, G#, A. Additionally, we hear an aural approximation of the complex interlock and tutti byong's. This is no mistake, Harrison was at the very least using Balinese Gamelan as an explicit aural model as early as 1949. Interestingly, this is the same approximation Colin McPhee used in his landmark study Music in Bali. [6] [7] This suggests to me that Lou may have been familiar with McPhee's earlier than what I've typically seen reported. This is speculative, and I'm willing to trust both pairs of biographers on this, as they had a Lou has a primary source and I don't.

[1] Exhibit A, and Exhibit B. You hear many percussion textures (GONGS!) in Exhibit A that are reminiscent of Chinese Opera (as well as tell-tale Orientalist signifier of pentatonicism). In exhibit B you hear timbres that can be described as more "nasally", a common feature of Chinese traditional music. [2] [3]

[2] Considering "Orientalism" as described in Edward Said's Orientalism. I am not using "Oriental" as a means of describing members of the eclectic Asian diaspora. (Said, Edward W. *Orientalism.*Vintage Books, New York: 1979)

[3] Lau, Frederick.Music in China: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture.Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2008.

[4] Alves, Bill; Campbell, Brett. Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick. Indiana University Press: 2017. 43.

[5] As I mentioned in this post, both Harrison biographical works were written by fans and friends of Harrison using Harrison as a primary source. I don't think Lieberman-Miller and especially Alves-Campbell provide a nuanced enough critique of Harrison's involvement in the music of other cultures, and I believe it to be in some way influenced by their personal biases. I love Harrison's work, and I think he is an incredibly important figure to American music, but ignoring these critiques of Harrison's music is going to do no one any good.

[6] Harrison, Lou. Entrance of the Moon Bull in Solstice. 1949. mm 1-30

[7] McPhee, Colin. Music in Bali. Yale University Press, New Have: 1966. Note, this was published posthumously, and is based off of McPhee's original work that was published in the 30's.

Week 82

 

For all those who disapproved of Wilson's declaration – his "unfortunate appeal" to the Italian people, published on the press on April 23^rd 1919 – intempestive, misguided, expression of self-indulgent political and diplomatic naivety, or rather calculated, deliberate choice to vindicate his own integrity at the opening of the troubled negotiations with Germany, as it has been branded since its publication, there were at least a few who approved of it.

On May 10^th 1919, Lt. Le Roy King, assigned to report from Agram (now Zagreb – hence on Croatian matters) since March by the Head of the American Mission to Vienna, the expert of Austro-Hungarian matters Archibald Cary Coolidge, wrote back to the latter:

President Wilson’s declaration concerning Fiume has greatly gratified and consoled this volatile people. They are very pleased and seem calmly to await the final decision. The armed occupation of Fiume by the Italians does not disturb them much, as they are convinced that the former must give way, and that France and England will now support America in this question. They think that Orlando acted childishly in rushing away from the Conference, and that his country is somewhat isolated by the reported alliance between America, England and France. […] The Italians have occupied Fiume in force and are fortifying their lines. They are digging trenches and putting up barbed wire. I learn from the French that they have advanced nearly up to Bakar, and are close to Sersak. With respect to the latter place Colonel Dehove was not fully informed, and could not tell me much as he is not reporting on the Fiume situation. There is no fighting: the Italians are merely digging themselves in. Col. Dehove informs me that General Grazioli announced that the Italians would not evacuate Fiume under any circumstances and would fight for its possession if necessary. The slight affray between the French and Italians at Sersak, which was reported in the Viennese papers about 1^st of May, appears to have been negligible. The French, of course, will say nothing about it; but the Croats here who ought to know, and who would be glad to recount such an affair, treat it as of little importance.

Harold Temperley – the British historian who had recently come back from the Yugoslav regions to work as an adviser at the Peace Conference – observed in his private annotations that the statement had indeed been "very noble". He was also of the opinion that "Fiume meant war in two or three years", a view he had shared with Kerr, Balfour and Lloyd George on the 21^st and 22^nd of April.

This was, according to him, "the universal view" – and he might have somewhat overestimated the belligerent attitude of both sides, or failed at least to read correctly into the proclamations of national sentiment: no matter their desires and aspirations, and despite Prime Minister Orlando proclaiming his "firm belief" in the Italian people being ready "to face new dangers and to suffer through more sacrifices", the Italian masses at least dreaded war more than they wanted Fiume, as the elections of November would prove later on. And already in the last days of April, discussing the Italian position at the Peace Conference, socialist leader Filippo Turati had conjured the rhetorical ghastly presence of "another war - how can you even think of that?".

The press, of course, was singing to a different tune. And there was, in the Italian establishment, a certain incredulity for Wilson's approach what appeared to be an eminently diplomatic problem. As former Prime Minister Luigi Luzzatti noted in his exposition of the order of business of confidence to Orlando (April 29^th 1919), it was as if Wilson

had imagined somehow that the Italian people could side with him, rather than with their Government. A new, unprecedented occurrence in diplomatic negotiations!

And had failed to realize the impact of his declarations on the internal political climate.

In this most serious circumstance, it is our duty to reaffirm our full confidence in our Government – continued Luzzatti – and to leave any possible criticism to more serene times.

Of course, it's unlikely that the few weeks extension possibly gained by the Italian Government, with the Parliament unable to immediately solve the political crisis originated by the failure to negotiate a suitable settlement with the Allies and therefore siding with the Executive in their full ranks, was at the center of Wilson's mind when he made his statement. In fact it would be hard to sustain that he had the means to evaluate the possible repercussion on the Italian internal situation – and in fact it is possible, at least to an extent, that he had genuinely expected a different reaction to the publication of his statement – or that he was overly concerned with its negative impact.

If Wilson's declaration had, from a diplomatic point of view, the effect of a stopping block on the Italian aspirations – a nec plus ultra - to which the US President remained substantially loyal until the end of his presidency, it also meant that, in its character of a matter of fact statement (given the extreme unbalance of the financial and political relations between Italy and the US at the time, the United States were able to have the last word on the matter, as long as they maintained a military and financial presence in the region), its more immediate negative consequences were to be found in the open deterioration of the relations between the two nations, rather than in its impact on the settlement of the Fiume affair.

It was therefore somewhat unfortunate that, despite the sentiments voiced by the Italian press and political world, the issue of Fiume would remain – outside of the people directly invested by the events – in large part dominated by its symbolic and instrumental value, so that the actual settlement came to be secondary to the galaxy of primary interests orbiting around the city. At the same time, in a bizarre turn of events, the ultimate solution of the Adriatic question wasn't that far removed from the one proposed by the Italian delegation as a possible conciliatory solution; the only difference being the substantial amount of resentment, personal and political recriminations and genuine human suffering which accumulated during those months. And yet it is difficult to share the view that a solution could have been found on the basis of such a conciliatory plan, since – outside of any consideration on the supposed actual merit of the various claims – each party involved was either unwilling or unable to come to a conciliation, or simply, for any other reason one may invoke, such a conciliation was not found.

After the fall of Orlando's government, it would be Francesco Saverio Nitti's turn to attempt a solution – operating in a much worse diplomatic, political and financial situation – without much success. With his usual overestimation of the impact of his personal initiatives, but not without a certain degree of insight, Nitti illustrated the causes of the diplomatic crisis (L'Europa senza pace - “Peace-less Europe”, 1921):

Those who put together the Pact of London had never thought of Fiume, rather they chose to leave it specifically to Croatia, both in the circumstance that Austria-Hungary remained united, and in the case Croatia detached herself from it. It is not correct to say that the Italian negotiators [...] had given up on Fiume because of the opposition of Russia or France. There was no opposition because there was no demand. The representatives of France and Russia have declared officially to me that there was no refusal coming from their Governments, since no inquiry was ever made in this direction. Rather, after the armistice, the movement for Fiume grew strong with the favor of the Government itself; and the movement in Fiume grew strong and spontaneous when it became known, due to the publication on newspapers, that the Pact of London gave Fiume to Croatia. If, instead of demanding large portions of Dalmatia within the Treaty of London, which are entirely or almost entirely Slavic, one had provided to design the formation of a state in Fiume, of such nature as to guarantee not only the population of Italian nationality, but the economical interests of all the peoples converging there, the Italian request would have certainly found no opposition.

We could say that most of these points are somewhat debatable, but the general picture is fair. The Italian delegation had not pursued this form of solution since the beginning, only introducing it in later times while contemporarily holding to the Treaty of London – a threat which they had no desire to, and likely could not realistically put into action.